Much empty talk about race

John L. Jackson Jr.

teaches anthropology

and communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Attorney General Eric Holder got it half right. Americans are cowards when it comes to discussing racial issues, but not because we don't talk about race enough.

If we monitored our daily exchanges closely, we would probably find that most of us invoke race a lot. People are constantly taking part in their own mini-dialogues on race, even if their comments sometimes hide snugly behind practiced euphemisms. Americans actually talk about race all the time. We just do it very badly.

As Holder pointed out, many Americans live in two distinct racial worlds. One is a public, usually heterogeneous place where different social groups interact, however fleetingly and superficially, over cups of coffee or across partitions between desks.

The other is more homogenous - a private world of our family members and closest friends, where people can let down their guard and vent. Race gets discussed much more honestly around the all-white or all-black kitchen table than it does around the mixed-raced water cooler.

Americans weren't always cowardly about discussing race in public. The Founding Fathers candidly pondered the inferiority of their African slaves. After emancipation, blacks railed publicly against racial discrimination. As late as the 1960s, white politicians ran on explicitly racist platforms.

We became timid about race only after the civil-rights movement successfully demonized public displays of rabid racial intolerance. That was a good thing. But we misunderstand what the movement gave us if we think about racial politeness as our social finish line, instead of a new starting block.

Sanitized public discourse about race only breeds more skepticism and even justifiable paranoia. People might reasonably imagine that other folks are telling them everything they want to hear in public, while reserving their more honest, uncensored racial opinions for the aforementioned kitchen tables.

Conducting research in such places as Harlem and Brooklyn, I often hear African Americans wax nostalgic about the racial transparency of the Old South. These people aren't asking to be Jim Crowed or longing for separate water fountains. But, in their mythological renderings of the Old South's racial landscape, "what you see is what you get." A "conversation on race" in the 1950s South wouldn't have needed to contend with the suspicion that egalitarian rhetoric might be masking racial hatred.

People are afraid to speak honestly about race because they fear it will get them in trouble, not because they are closeted racists. We are all so awkward and unpracticed in robust interracial communication that we rightly expect to say something stupid once we start trying.

When we do reach out to other groups, we often end up trapped in a game of accusation and counteraccusation. That's where just about all of our public discussions about race end up these days.

The recent brouhaha over a New York Post cartoon is a case in point. A police officer in the drawing makes a quip about a gunned-down chimp's connection to the economic-stimulus package, and the paper gets called out for trafficking in age-old popular and scientific stereotypes about black people being evolutionarily closer to other primates.

Of course, the newspaper and the artist don't then say, "Well, blacks are more like chimps than whites are," a response we might have expected in the first half of the last century. Instead, the artist maintains that he didn't intend it to be racist and calls the very accusation ridiculous. The would-be "conversation on race" starts with a premature ending - a-let's-see-who-blinks-first standoff.

A "conversation" on race in which everyone talks and no one listens isn't a conversation at all. It is a high school debate dressed up to look like dialogue. A debate can be fine, but its point is winning. In a real dialogue, the point is to understand what someone else is saying and why.

So Holder is calling for an honest conversation about race. We do need that conversation, but not any old conversation will do. Bad dialogues about race - ideological debates with everybody talking and nobody listening in good faith - are ultimately as productive as saying nothing at all.

And any conversation in a social vacuum isn't enough, either, no matter how honest it is. Conversations among strangers with little real social contact or commitment to one another might be educational, but they won't even come close to solving America's racial problems.